Levelling Up: Bolton Council missed funding deadline due to email size

Bolton Council missed the 18 June deadline for funding for the Crompton Place development

A council missed the deadline for submitting a £16m Levelling Up Fund bid because a crucial email was too big to send, it has been revealed.

Bolton Council intended to apply for funding for the town's Crompton Place scheme but missed the 18 June deadline.

In November, the Local Democracy Reporting Service revealed council bosses had blamed "technical issues".

A meeting on Monday was told the submission had been too large to be received by the government's server.

Addressing the Conservative-run council's corporate scrutiny meeting, the borough's director of place Gerry Brough said "two bids were being simultaneously submitted", the Crompton Place one and another for the new medical college at the hospital site.

"Both bids involved collating many separate documents and third party letters of support and unfortunately we did not receive all necessary signed documents until that morning," he said.

"At the point of submission, it became apparent that file size limitations on the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government server meant that both bids had to be broken down into four separate parts, so they could be attached to four separate emails.

"The medical college bid was submitted first and in full before the noon deadline [but] the Crompton Place bid could not be submitted in full before the deadline."

'Unanswered questions'

He said council officers had told the ministry that "some documentation was submitted after the deadline and received confirmations that all documentations had been received".

"No indication was provided at this point that the bid was unacceptable.

"Failure to submit before the deadline was only highlighted as an issue when the ministry confirmed our bid was unsuccessful in October."

He said there was "no certainty that the bid would have been approved" if the documents were received on time.

He added that unsuccessful first round bids could be resubmitted as second round bids.

The bid for £20m for the Bolton College of Medical Science scheme was successful.

Bolton Council failed to submit all the relevant documents for the application in time

Following the meeting, Nick Peel, the leader of the council's Labour opposition, said the details of why the bid failed had only come to light because he had "asked the relevant questions".

"Had I not pursued this, the public of Bolton would have been kept completely in the dark," he said.

"These are not the actions of an open and transparent council."

He added that he was "far from happy with the answers I have received" and the "whole saga still leaves a lot of unanswered questions".

"The fact is that the council did drop the ball [and] it is quite frankly a very costly mess."

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